1013. Asleep
(I.)
“HELP ME.” MY VOICE sounds pained and overwrought. I can’t see anything clearly, I don’t know where we are, my eyes aren’t working, everything is dark. Not like a dark room, dark like a failing optical nerve. It’s starting to panic me until she takes my face in her hands.
Her voice is steady, almost clinical. “What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. Talk to me.” I close my eyes and rock slowly back and forth while you sing some nasty schoolyard chant in my head. “Please.”
She pauses for a moment. Long enough that I wonder, idly, about her capacity for cruelty. About what she can bear to witness before she looks away.
“I do this thing.” Her voice, unlike mine, is measured and soft. “In every situation, I imagine what a person might do.”
“A person?” My teeth are chattering but I lift my head to look at her. She comes slowly into focus, one detail at a time. Eyes first. Then the blossom of her lips.
“More like a character,” she says, after thinking about it for a while.
I have a feeling I’m witnessing a performance. That she knew exactly what the answer was, but didn’t want to say it.
“A character,” I echo.
“People are confusing,” she says with a shrug. “Don’t you think?”
I manage a derisive snort (like I even know another person aside from you), though it’s an effort. I haven’t stopped shaking yet, and the harder task is trying not to let my teeth chatter into the meat of my tongue.
“It’s easier to imagine who I’m supposed to be,” she continues. “So, I look at the setting and the story—”
“The other characters?” This I contribute with a wheeze.
“Yes.” She nods. That drawn-on smile, the garish red lipstick, grows increasingly distracting. Still, it becomes easier to control my breathing the longer she talks.
Easier to speak, too. “I meant that as a joke,” I clarify. “You know, like, you see everyone as characters.” She looks at me blankly. “It’s not exactly the way anyone wants to be seen.”
She shrugs. “I guess.”
Then, apparently thinking better of it, she looks a little longer at me. “Ah, I get it.” She sucks some blood out from under her nails, picking at the dry skin of her cuticles and rumbling a caustic laugh. “You want me to reassure you that you’re a person.”
I manage through gritted teeth: “I don’t need you to tell me I’m a person.”
She smiles thinly.
“Jude,” she says, “don’t fucking lie to me, okay? Not to me.”
She runs her finger down my chest. A long, straight line, like she plans to crack my breastbone open. She finds the deep gash across my stomach and sticks her finger into it, like a socket. She even whispers “bzzz.”
I can’t stop shaking, but I reach for her.
“I’m not lying,” I plead, but then I see you. You’re watching me in the mirror.
“Jude,” you say impatiently, “watch your mouth.”
(II.)
The top is down on the cherry-red car and she’s behind the wheel, drinking a martini. She has one of those old-fashioned scarves tied over her hair; it matches the horrible lipstick. I want to ask her to wash it off, but I know she won’t listen to me.
“I just feel like I become someone … different. You know?” She looks over at me and her eyes are so happy, so filled with delight, that I almost ask her if she’ll let me draw her.
I want to record it somewhere for posterity; it isn’t right for only me to see.
“Or just … someone. Whenever you let your darkness out.”
She takes both hands off the wheel to sip from the martini and mime a slash across her throat at the same time. It appears on her neck in lipstick.
Her eyes flick to my lips. My throat.
Back to my eyes.
“We’re going to crash,” I point out. My heart is pounding.
She pouts but puts her hands back on the wheel. “I don’t know what I want,” she says, and hits the gas hard, so the pedal nearly lies flat. She’s wearing kitten heels in an ugly, plastic shade of lipstick red and we’re careening down the hillside roads, blindly rounding every corner.
“I think you do,” I shout over the sound of the engine.
She laughs like I said something funny. She tosses the martini glass over her shoulder and it shatters somewhere on the road behind us. The beds of her nails are plastic red, stained below the half-moon crescents.
“Fine,” she shouts, “I want to know! What you’ve done. How far this goes.” The look on her face is dreamlike when she says, “I want to know how much of it is real.”
The drone of the car muffler is so loud, but it’s also so quiet. Eventually, I realize that’s because of you. You’re not talking, you’re listening. I can’t decide which one is worse. (The truth is that sometimes you tell me what to say, and that’s much easier.)
“What if all of it is real?” I counter at a yell.
“And?”
I don’t understand the question. “And what?”
“And what else?”
“And nothing. That’s it, everything’s real, maybe that’s the answer—”
“If everything’s real then you’re a murderer and a pussy-ass bitch.” She laughs.
I laugh, too. It’s funny. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
She revs the engine and the number on the speedometer isn’t even legible.
I think it might be broken. We’re going so fast that her skin has begun to warp a little.
It’s peeling back from her face so I can see the shadows of her eye socket, her nasal cavity.
There’s a tear in the dimple on her cheek.
Early evidence of sun damage freckles the flapping skin of her forehead, the crinkled corner of her eye.
She looks beautiful, not like the hills.
Black spores spread across them, mottling the underbrush until it flutters away on the wind, like disintegrating ash.
“Anya, you’re bleeding,” I notice then. Rose petals scatter across the car’s worn upholstery.
She looks at me for a moment, with a grin. She lets her hands float over the top of the steering wheel. The car takes a sharp turn, or rather, the road does.
The car doesn’t.
“Jude,” you say again. “Shut the fuck up.”
(III.)
She’s hanging upside down like a bat in the corner of the greenhouse and all the blood’s drained into her face, specifically her lips. She doesn’t seem uncomfortable. Then again, the drawn-on smile can be misleading. I’m starting to think she’s not actually happy at all.
I’m wearing a trench coat and holding a notepad.
I’m scribbling down things that I see, or that’s what I must have been doing, because on the page that’s flipped open it says …
plants … flies … rotting organic material …
black spores … broken stone … eternal love …
pretty girl hanging upside down like a bat …
“You can’t tell anyone the truth about me, okay?” she says. She’s starting to revolve in place, so she stops talking until momentum turns her back in my direction. “I just don’t think it’s a very good idea for anyone to see.”
“The truth about where you live, you mean?” I agree, it’s a bad idea. The less any of us know the better, me included. Especially me.
“No, no. It’s just that all this, it’s kind of a safety thing.
” She gestures to herself vaguely, but because she’s revolving in place I don’t really understand what she’s pointing to.
“I know it’s not very progressively minded, but they still run the world.
And I don’t really see how I get brownie points for being a victim. ”
I don’t know what she’s talking about, but fair enough. She’s been upside down for a really long time, which I don’t think is very good for brain cells.
“Do you think maybe we’re in some kind of nightmare?”
I still don’t hear you, which is actually starting to freak me out.
Stockholm Syndrome, you comment with an air of picking your teeth.
I exhale, relieved.
“In any case, just don’t tell anyone,” she continues.
She’s still turning, slowly, turning. Her hands and ankles are bound so tight I can see the imprints of each individual strand in the rope burning into her skin.
Something’s spreading up her arms like spores.
“I mean, not that you usually tell anyone anything, as far as I know. What have you been doing for the last twenty-whatever years, anyway?”
“Nothing,” I say. It’s true.
“Oh?” She waits for a full revolution before asking, “What was your mother like?”
The answer depresses me. “Beautiful.”
Some of the blood has started to run from her torso down the lengths of her arm.
It’s gathering in a small pool in the fountain.
I hope that in this dream I’ve repaired the motor.
I’ve ordered at least a dozen different kinds, I can’t figure out why it still won’t run.
I hope that out there somewhere, in my real life, my body is ordering a new one.
You guffaw from the back of my brain.
From the mirror, though, you agree. “You’re useless,” you say.
There’s no real mettle in it, nothing to be concerned about, business as usual.
Then your eyes slide from me to Anya, who isn’t spinning anymore.
She’s still upside down, but there’s a mottled shadow reaching her from the wall. The wood is rotting, black with toxins.
“Any hobbies?” she asks. The rot is starting to cocoon around her.
I think about the computer at the public library. The banality of online classes. The gamified GED you can get when your doctor grudgingly agrees to tell people you have epilepsy, which isn’t the biggest lie they could have gone with. I certainly have a lot of visions.
“You and Joan of Arc,” she agrees. “Basically the same person.” The cocoon is really developing fast. I can only sort of see her now through the splotches of graying spores. She coughs, then, and coughs again.
“Is there a point to this?” I ask. “I feel like we keep having the same conversations over and over.”
“Well, it’s just that I love stupid questions,” she says.
“You think you deserve this legacy?” (A different voice this time, a raging hiss.)
“Jude. Wake up.”
“I loooooooove stupid questions,” she repeats melodically, and keeps singing, even after the black mold swallows her up.
(IV.)